


Hypotheticals

by esme_green



Category: Lizzie Bennet Diaries
Genre: F/M, Meta, Remix
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-09
Updated: 2013-02-09
Packaged: 2017-11-28 18:14:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,580
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/677363
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/esme_green/pseuds/esme_green
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Warning: This is kind of a downer. Don't read if you're looking for a pick-me-up.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hypotheticals

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Happy Endings](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/17179) by Margaret Atwood. 



> So...I remixed a 30-year-old Margaret Atwood short. I would say that being forced to wait for more LBD is not helping the shitty week I've been having, but this was so much fun, not to say cathartic, that I may do this with some other 'ships (leave your suggestions in the comments!). I blame izzyfics for the addiction to this awesome show and apologize to her and the internet at large that this isn't rooftop pool porn. :)

 

* * *

  
  
Lizzie and Darcy admit their feelings for one another.  
  
Now what?

  
A.  
  
Lizzie and Darcy date, decide it really is true love, and get married. Darcy continues to conquer the digital world as a CEO, and Lizzie becomes a busy, sought-after consultant on web video and social media. They get a nice faux-Georgian in Pacific Heights, and after a few years, decide to have a couple of kids. Their daughter seems to have been business- and web-savvy since birth, and when she's twenty-two the Pemberley Digital board votes unanimously to make her an executive in the company. Their son receives a football scholarship, manages not to get too many concussions, and becomes a well-respected academic studying levels of mediation in interactive media. Lizzie and Darcy never fall out of love. After a few more years, Darcy hands his company over to his daughter, Lizzie starts funnelling all keynote speaker requests to her son, and they retire together. They travel the world having epic adventures. Eventually, after long, happy, and fulfilled lives, they pass away.

  
  
B.  
  
Lizzie and Darcy date for a while, but Lizzie slowly begins to realize she's not really in love with Darcy. It's true she was wrong about the whole Mr. Douchey thing, and he's smart and loves his family and does have a sense of fun. But all the little nitpicky things that irritated her when they were living at Netherfield last summer start surfacing again, and she knows he's not really the one.  
  
Darcy is hopelessly in love with Lizzie and continues to do everything he can to help her. He puts her in touch with the right people to help find her a job, buys concert tickets because he thinks she might like them, even offers to pay her rent—just until she gets the right job, he says—to keep her close by in the city. He goes down on her every time they have sex, and quite often when they're alone and it seems like she's in a bad mood. She usually doesn't reciprocate.  
  
Lizzie starts to distance herself from Darcy, choosing to spend her evenings out at restaurants and concerts with new friends. Fitz and Gigi and Caroline all tell Darcy that she doesn't love him the way he wants her to. Even Bing, deliriously happy with Jane, surfaces from his honeymoon euphoria to hint that Darcy's ideal of Lizzie might not be reality.  
  
After his conversation with Bing, Darcy does something he never does—he gets completely wasted. He drinks more tequila than you would believe, and stumbles out into the street after the bartender cuts him off. While he's concentrating on shuffling up one of those fucking unforgiving hills, the brake slips on some tourist's car and it lurches onto the sidewalk and smashes into Darcy, knocking him down and then rolling right over him.  
  
Darcy looks up at the stars, at least the ones he can see in the city, and wonders if Lizzie will come rushing to the hospital, if she'll suddenly realize how much she truly loves him, that they were meant to be together. Unfortunately, his injuries are too extensive and he dies, bleeding out before the paramedics can get to him.  
  
Lizzie does several web videos blaming herself, indulging in the full spectrum of guilt and self-recrimination. Her sisters and best friend guest-star, telling her it wasn't her fault, that someone else's choices or simple fate led to the tragedy. Her viewers all tell her the same thing. You've seen this part before.  
  
Once Lizzie finally, tearfully accepts that she is truly blameless and had no part in Darcy's death, she begins to date again. Eventually she marries a nice man named Alistair who has the same taste in literature she has, and everything continues for Lizzie and Alistair as in A.  
  


  
C.  
  
Lizzie isn't really in love with Darcy at all, but she likes him quite a bit and she's grateful to him for all he's done for her family. And she knows she owes him for everything he's silently endured at her hands. So she goes back to Netherfield with him and fucks his brains out. It turns out he can keep it up for quite a while, and that he's got some moves too, so she has a pretty good time. The pillow talk isn't awkward; he's intelligent and totally not wrapped up in himself. So she fucks him a few more times while he's at Netherfield, and again afterwards when she goes back to San Francisco to finish her independent study. At some point it becomes a habit.  
  
Lizzie tries not to be a dick about it. She tells Darcy she can't commit to anything serious, that she has to be free to move wherever life takes her once she gets a job, that what they're doing is fun, but she can't do long-term right now. Darcy says he understands. The fact that they have these conversations immediately after sex probably helps.  
  
One day while trying to find a Marina restaurant Gigi recommended, Lizzie meets Alistair, who is slightly younger than Darcy, but still pretty rich, handsome, and blond. They have an instant connection, and Alistair doesn't speak like he's holding forth from the nineteeth century. They talk for hours, and somehow end up back at Lizzie's apartment, tipsy and giggly, chattering away to each other about everything under the sun. When they mock-wrestle they fall onto Lizzie's bed and Lizzie can't remember the last time sex was just so freeing and fun.  
  
Darcy walks into the apartment—Lizzie has forgotten to lock her door—and finds them sleeping off some serious afterglow. He's not the kind of man to ignore an issue, so he wakes Lizzie up, takes her out onto the tiny glass-and-steel balcony, and starts yelling at her.  
  
Lizzie, dazed from being hauled out of bed and still a bit muzzy from being day-drunk, lets him get everything out of his system. She deserves this, she knows, and says as much.  
  
Darcy takes a step forward to emphasize his point, and though she knows he'll never lay a hand on her, Lizzie still takes an instinctive step back. She slips. Her fully body weight lands on the balcony railing, and the sheet of glass it's holding in place slides free and falls. Lizzie's feet go out from under her and into the empty space where the glass used to be and momentum is carrying her over the edge. Darcy lunges, grabs her hands to save her, but can't stop his own forward motion in time. They tumble over together, fall eight stories, and smash on pavement already littered with broken glass. They are both killed instantly.  
  
Alistair, who had woken up during the yelling and started pulling on his clothes in case he needed to either intervene or make a discreet exit, runs out onto the balcony too late. What he sees on the pavement makes him vomit. He calls the police, makes a full statement, and is wracked with guilt and grief.  
  
Eventually, after time, therapy, and some serious personal growth, Alistair meets a nice woman named Edith. Everything continues in the same vein as A, but with different names.  
  


  
D.  
  
Lizzie and Darcy are truly in love. They get along well and learn to communicate so that they can work out any minor issues that arise. But they live in earthquake-prone San Francisco, and one day the Big One hits. The rest of the story is about the earthquake and how they escape from it. They do, though thousands die horribly in collapsed buildings and fires and later from poor sanitation. As Pemberley Digital had set up off-site data centres for just this kind of emergency, the core of the company is safe, and Lizzie and Darcy are able to do quite a bit for the relief effort, grateful to be alive. Everything eventually continues as in A.  
  


  
E.  
  
Yes, but Darcy is diagnosed with Huntington's. His parents had passed away fairly young, before the disease manifested in either of them, so this is a terrible shock. Darcy and Lizzie stick together throughout the next twenty years as Darcy's condition inexorably deteriorates. After Darcy dies, Lizzie devotes herself to funding promising research for a cure. If you like, it could be "Lizzie", "kidney disease", "sudden death" and "organ donation".  
  


  
F.  
  
If you think this is all too trite, too suburban-middle or upper-middle-class, too OMGBORING, you could embroil them in some black-ops conspiracy, one that would co-opt Domino for nefarious purposes and eventually empower the internet to control us, instead of the other way around. Remember, though, to stick to your genre. This is romance, not sci-fi. You can still end up with A, and in between you'll have edge-of-your-seat excitement, people running down hallways, and Darcy and/or Fitz saying, "I got this" before sitting down at their computers, pushing reading glasses up their noses, and typing for improbable lengths of time. But three years from now people will think this is all hopelessly out of date.  
  
  
  
As you navigate the burgeoning sea of Mary Sues and AUs, of backstories and missing scenes and character studies and wish-fulfilment porn, remember that while beginnings of stories are fun, what happens at the end is always the same.  
  
Lizzie and Darcy die.  
  
They die. Either after the happily ever after or before or during or unhappy and alone. They die. That is the truth, universally acknowledged.  
  
  
  
  
  
END  
  
  
  


  
  


**Author's Note:**

> Honestly, I really can't wait to see what happens next! [Glass panels falling off balconies](http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/story/2011/08/03/f-falling-glass.html).


End file.
